Week 3 Building your own Pharmacy - I Have A Dream

Week Three- "I have a Dream"- The advantages of Building your own Pharmacy!
Chances are if you one day dreamed of opening your own pharmacy, you have probably have had thousands of ideas of how it would look. How it would be different. Ideas of how you would help your patients and clients manage their pharmaceutical regimens better, brought feelings of pride. Your Pharmacy would be different and stand out above the rest!
The best way to be fresh, innovative, creative , and set the stage to stand out from the rest, is to start fresh. To mold a pharmacy to be the model or your dream and one you would be proud of.
Anice new facility promotes a fresh business, a clean professional environment and a new and inquisitive market. Many will come in just to see what is new.
Those are the best and most emotional driven reasons for starting a pharmacy from scratch. Here are some of the more practical.
Capital Outlay. The amount of actual cash needed to start a pharmacy will usually be far less than purchasing an existing pharmacy. There are many positives for this approach. If you buy an existing pharmacy, you are often paying for "good will" which may or may not be a realized value. In addition, well established stores are often older, cluttered, have mounds of old paperwork all over in counters, drawers and back rooms. Often the equipment, fixtures and computers are old and may need replacement or repair in the near future. In a new pharmacy, you know you will not have these expenses for a considerable amount of time. In addition, they will be in good working order.
Another very good point for starting a pharmacy from scratch, is as any pharmacist knows, the impending visits from your board of pharmacy inspectors, DEA agents, Medicaid, Medicare and third party insurances. A new pharmacy will have no past history to dig through, and best of all, the filing systems put into place will be your own. How important is it for your inspection, your pharmacy and your sanity to be able to put your hands on everything, quickly, easily and to demonstrate your organized pharmacy to any of these "visitors". This will save you countless time, money and anxiety.
Operations- design the pharmacy the way you want it to flow. The largest companies in the world spend countless dollars doing studies on efficiency, work flow and how to save a step here and a step there. It adds up. Designing a pharmacy might not need that level of sophistication however setting up a pharmacy to work efficiently and the way YOU want to work, will pay dividends over and over for years as opposed to having to work in a flow that is there only because it was there and you would have to re-design the pharmacy to change it. Long Term Dividends!
This ties into to another point; you don’t inherit someone else’s problems. Whether it is a bad lease, or bad landlord, poor parking, structural impedances, or local traffic flow that may have recently changed, all these (and I am sure you can think of many more) come with "the territory" when you purchase someone’s business. When you design your own, you have many choices to chose from and can avoid some of these or if you can’t avoid, may be able to negotiate satisfactory alternatives.
In the end, it all comes down to money. This is one of the biggest advantages of starting a pharmacy from scratch.
1. It costs less money to get in the game
2. You get a return on investment much sooner
These are two very important factors and while they come with a trade off, they do make this a very attractive option for many new pharmacy owners. The cost to start your own pharmacy will require approximately 40% of what it will cost to purchase an existing pharmacy. This makes the entry into the game substantially less. It also provides you with a more attractive "Return on Investment". While the trade off is the time it takes to "ramp up" sales in a new store to attain sales that will support the owner, if the owner can budget for this period and has the motivation to market, the pharmacy can more easily pay off debt and more easily attain profitability. Next week we will address the disadvantages of starting from scratch. That will round off our four weeks of positives and negatives of both purchasing or building. We will then finish off with how do you decide what is the right solution for you.
Week Four- "I think I am going to stand in traffic" – The disadvantages of starting brand new.

Dean A. Pedalino R.Ph., C.Ph., FASCP